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How to Start Google

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to Start Google

#431

Post by dekhn »

Animats wrote: post #422

1. Get into Stanford just as Stanford is getting into the VC business. 2. Use Stanford bandwidth for your web crawler. 3. See how AltaVista does it; they're in downtown Palo Alto. 4. Get 100K from the guy who founded Sun. 5. Move into the space above the bike shop in Palo Alto. (9 major startups began there.) 6. Get more funding from the guy who founded Amazon. 7. Sell search ads. 8. Profit!

Stanford was in the VC business long, long before. It's been told many times but Frank Terman set up much of the infrastructure to enable this back in the 1950s, building Stanford Research Park which housed Varian (microwaves and other RF), HP (some digital electronics stuff), and Lockheed (some bomb stuff). And that work built off the incredible investments into California infrastructure by the US military during WWII (https://steveblank.com/category/secret-history-of-silicon-va...), which followed some amazing investments in education, transport, and housing since the beginning of the gold rush.

But, in all honesty, if you want to identify single factors that truly contributed to Google not just surviving but thriving, I'd point at Jeff Dean. When he joined, Google was unable to update its index due to the design of the indexer. Jeff (along with Sanjay, or as many of us know him, "The Wise One"), built seminal software that enabled google to grow rapidly - not just updating the index faster, but doing search quality on logs, early ad experiments, and more. Obviously, other people played critical roles (Silverstein, /proc/bogdan, SRE Lucas) but IMHO if they hadn't had Jeff and Sanjay, google would have died back in 97 or 98.

Re: How to Start Google

#432

Post by zerr »

dpbriggs wrote: post #430
Animats wrote: post #422

1. Get into Stanford just as Stanford is getting into the VC business. 2. Use Stanford bandwidth for your web crawler. 3. See how AltaVista does it; they're in downtown Palo Alto. 4. Get 100K from the guy who founded Sun. 5. Move into the space above the bike shop in Palo Alto. (9 major startups began there.) 6. Get more funding from the guy who founded Amazon. 7. Sell search ads. 8. Profit!

In the zero interest rate environment it was easier to get good advice and orders of magnitude more more money. A lot of those companies are crap. Google had good timing but importantly, a good product and market fit. Prior search engines sucked in comparison with obnoxious monetization.

I think the UX was the main reason people flocked to Google - an empty white page with a single search text entry and a button.

Re: How to Start Google

#433

Post by batshit_beaver »

etothepii wrote: post #382
suyash wrote: post #18

Ok, so I am having a hard time buying the idea that just make a fun project if you want to create a something like 'Google'. Startup 101 teaches us that you need to solve a painful problem that lot of people have, that is the best way to create 'Google', so isn't the advise contradictory?

This advice is for 14/15 year olds. I think the advice would be different for 22-year-olds. It would be different still for 35-year-olds. 22-year-olds have a hard time selling to enterprises, 14-year-olds will find it impossible. Whereas if they build something cool that they and their friends love they will gain many of the skills that might be useful later on. PG has made the point many times that the superpower 22…

What's the super power of 35-year-olds? Arthritis?

Re: How to Start Google

#434

Post by xyzelement »

codethatwerks wrote: post #416

What is the parallel advice for a 40 year old? I guess the programming and tinkering stuff still applies. But university cannot be redone. Sure I can study but I wont have any connection to most young people. I’ll be the old guy. And this assumes I can afford the loss of income. I assume a lot of start ups are started by older people too. I think for older people an advantage is to solve older people problems. Like h…

// Also being older I don’t care about making a unicorn

You can use that term as a proxy for delivering large impact to the world. It's approximately the same thing. If you do something like "aged care" and "dealing with kids schools" in a way that helps millions of people, you'll end up a billionaire whether you want to or not.

I don't use the term "unicorn" but I think keeping score in financial terms helps because that's how you know you've delivered something people want and at scale. If you remove money out of the equation it's easier to fool yourself thinking you're making some difference and you're not.

Re: How to Start Google

#435

Post by xyzelement »

batshit_beaver wrote: post #433
etothepii wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This advice is for 14/15 year olds. I think the advice would be different for 22-year-olds. It would be different still for 35-year-olds. 22-year-olds have a hard time selling to enterprises, 14-year-olds will find it impossible. Whereas if they build something cool that they and their friends love they will gain many of the skills that might be useful later on. PG has made the point many times that the superpower 22…

What's the super power of 35-year-olds? Arthritis?

Compared to my 25 and 15 year old self, my 35 (now 40) self is a lot wiser in terms of dealing with people, applying humility and being crisp on the wide gulf between "what I find is worth doing at the moment" and "what's valuable." I think these are all hugely valuable and serve me well.

Re: How to Start Google

#436

Post by n0us »

paulpauper wrote: post #250
n0us wrote: post #196

In the YC Youtube videos it's amusing that they (Jason and the other guy) almost always reference Google and Facebook despite the fact that neither of those companies were YC companies and none of the YC companies out of 4000+ funded (not even Stripe) come close to the scale or valuation of either Google or Facebook. https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/valuation

Google and Facebook had 2 decades. Even the most successful of YC companies had a little over a decade. Not a valid comparison. And $100+ billion for Coinbase, Stripe, Dropbox is still huge.

So why don’t they use those companies as examples instead?

Re: How to Start Google

#437

Post by emseetech »

codethatwerks wrote: post #416

What is the parallel advice for a 40 year old? I guess the programming and tinkering stuff still applies. But university cannot be redone. Sure I can study but I wont have any connection to most young people. I’ll be the old guy. And this assumes I can afford the loss of income. I assume a lot of start ups are started by older people too. I think for older people an advantage is to solve older people problems. Like h…

Less startup, more starting a business.

The older I get the less I want to build a startup and more I want to start a business. Something that takes a little bit of capital, lots of hard work, gets some customers and provides goods or services, without venture capital firms and 100x returns and everything that comes with that, just a standard business.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1SLHEC98I

Re: How to Start Google

#438

Post by runeb »

abhayhegde wrote: post #396

While I absolutely agree with PG here on identifying a missing link and solving it with technology as your own project is a good way to own a startup, I also feel most of his examples are reminiscent of survivorship bias. For every one of these giant trillion dollar companies, there are also thousands of companies that couldn't make it. Also, just by the distribution of it all, not every company can be a Google. Not…

From the perspective of society, this is how to start Google

Re: How to Start Google

#439

Post by mcmoor »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #206
awesomeMilou wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His dad wasn't "just" a computer scientist, he was a professor for computer science and artificial intelligence at Michigan State. Sergey Brin's father was equally a professor in mathematics at the University of Maryland. > It's obvious in retrospect that this was a great idea for a startup. It wasn't obvious at the time. It may not have been obvious, but the decision was damn well near as engineered with data as it…

This is what all these blogs don't really mention and I have seen this over and over and over again. You need a fundamental place in society: really high up to attempt to do any of this.

Well you can still be Larry Page's dad (or his grandad) and attempt to give your children a launching place to become Google. Most success have to be built multi generationally.

Re: How to Start Google

#440

Post by screye »

logifail wrote: post #359
screye wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could have been investing in Nvidia the whole time. Decision inertia means that employees often don't sell vested stock, and end up being lucky. Similarly, external investors aren't willing to put 30-50% of their networth into one bet and therefore miss out on the kind of luck that can set them up for life. There is nothing that a lowly engineer at Tesla or Nvidia knows, that can't be found out by an external inv…

> It's not about joining Tesla or Nvidia early. It's about betting on them. It's also possible to bet on Tesla/Nvidia and lose. Badly.

Exactly. every Nvidia/Tesla employee who became a millionaire recently CHOSE to hold onto their stocks after the vesting period.

That was a bet.

If they hadn't made the bet and sold stocks as soon as they vested, then the returns wouldn't have been as incredible.

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